self-driving cars Articles

Ford has announced today that they will begin building self-driving cars without steering wheels. They hope to launch their first on the market by 2021.

The line will be similar to those we are seeing from Tesla and Google, but with a few differences. For one, this is Ford, a mass productive brand that has been at the head of American auto manufacturing from near the beginning of the technology.

Google has created a new design for their ambitious self-driving cars. The first hundred experimental cars have an interesting feature: a total lack of steering wheels and brakes.

At first, that sounds perfectly natural…of course there are no steering wheels, they drive themselves! But the original idea was that drivers could eventually take back control of the vehicle and manually steer, such as in the case of emergencies or (though they won’t say this specifically) malfunctions.

The problem is that this is a totally new and innovative concept that will require some very difficult solutions. Ones that so far Google has not managed to come up with.